Cancer dormancy and criticality from a game theory perspective.

BACKGROUND: The physics of cancer dormancy, the time between initial cancer treatment and re-emergence after a protracted period, is a puzzle. Cancer cells interact with host cells via complex, non-linear population dynamics, which can lead to very non-intuitive but perhaps deterministic and understandable progression dynamics of cancer and dormancy. RESULTS: We explore here the dynamics of host-cancer cell populations in the presence of (1) payoffs gradients and (2) perturbations due to cell migration. CONCLUSIONS: We determine to what extent the time-dependence of the populations can be quantitively understood in spite of the underlying complexity of the individual agents and model the phenomena of dormancy.